How to avoid getting Complaints on your newsletter
How many peolea re happy with your newsletter and more importantly how many are really not happy and how that can kill your long term success sending newsletters. In this lecture we take a deeper look into complaints and see the steps we should do to try to avoid them.
Video Transcript
00:00Alright, so the next tab that I want to talk about is the Activity tab.
00:04We're going to go through it relatively quickly.
00:07Now, if we wanted to see who the users are that, for example, didn't...
00:12For who was it sent out, we could get a whole list of all the people the email was sent out to.
00:18If we wanted to see who opened it, we could get all the lists of the users that opened it or clicked it
00:22or didn't open it or bounced or unsubscribed or complained.
00:27Now, didn't open could be very interesting.
00:30For example, you might want to send a unique campaign to people that didn't open up your last email.
00:35And to do that, you would want to probably click on there and maybe create a group.
00:39And we're going to talk about creating groups very shortly to be able to actually send an email only to specific users.
00:45So, for example, maybe you want to send out an email to users that didn't open up your newsletter for the last 10 weeks,
00:51offer them something incredibly exclusive, such as something really free.
00:55Now, if they don't open that email and you give it like a window of two, three weeks for them to open it,
01:00then you're just going to delete them from your list, because after all, if they didn't get engaged by that really, really great offer,
01:06then you're just spending money on users that are not even reading your emails.
01:10And if we have a track record of them never opening up your email, it could be that they just don't exist as users
01:15and you're wasting your money.
01:16Not only are you wasting your money, Otsu, the search engines, such as Google and whatever, noticed...
01:22When I'm saying search engines, when I'm saying search engines, I mean the email providers.
01:25They care about how many people open up your emails.
01:27So, they're affecting your open rate.
01:29And when they're affecting your open rate, they're reducing the chance that you're going to get into the inbox
01:34because the more people that don't open up your emails, the more your emails are treated as spam.
01:39So, one thing that you really want to do is try to get rid of users that are just bad users.
01:43And we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a couple of minutes.
01:46All right.
01:47But let's continue into the bounce, which is very important.
01:49If you have users that are not getting the emails, you want to delete them.
01:52You don't need users that have an email that is full or users that are just not engaged with you at all.
01:58So, if your user is bouncing, then you want to get rid of them.
02:01In general, if there's a hard bounce, which basically means the server returns back a message to MailChimp
02:06telling it this user doesn't exist, then MailChimp will automatically delete the email account.
02:13Well, a soft bounce, it won't automatically delete it.
02:16A soft bounce basically says that right now, this user cannot receive more emails.
02:20Now, in a case like that, that means the user has a lot of emails,
02:24and it's just not really a relevant user probably.
02:27Now, this is something you probably would do on a manual basis because you're not going to get that many bounce emails, soft bounce emails.
02:33So, if you do get a soft bounce email, you could look at that track record and history of that user
02:38to see if you really are unhappy with that user, and then you can make that decision if you want to delete them or not.
02:43In this case, we don't have any bounce users for this email, and we know that we're very happy.
02:48Zero percent of our emails are bounce. You don't want to keep bounce emails.
02:52It's bad for your overall, especially if you have thousands of users.
02:55Just get rid of users that are bouncing because overall, it's another indicator that your quality of your list is just not good.
03:03Let's continue into the activity.
03:05When we're talking about unsubscribed users, that is a really important indicator.
03:10One is don't get upset. I wouldn't even worry about why, in general, they left your list.
03:16Just make sure that there is no spam clicking or did not sign up, inappropriate content.
03:22You want to know why they unsubscribed, so you can see that eight people left.
03:26Five are just not interested, which is fine. That's just part of nature.
03:30And three didn't specify why, which is completely fine as well.
03:34Now, if you see a specific user that might be an importing user,
03:37like as we indicated, this is a VIP user that means it's a user that was highly engaged,
03:42then we might want to send them a personal letter of sorts.
03:45But personally, myself, I prefer to disengage.
03:48If someone doesn't want to be on your list and they don't want to be on your list, then just let it go.
03:52Now, if you have a spam report or something of that nature, then it's a really, really red alert
03:57and you want to maybe send an email out to see what's going on.
04:00Try to find out what's going on, especially if you only send those emails on a personal level
04:05because you want to make sure that your list is not triggered as a spam
04:09and it's a very, very tricky situation.
04:12Even very successful newsletters, if suddenly 10, 20, 30 people click on them as spam,
04:18it could create a major, major drawback.
04:21And we have one of our lists that has a lot of issues because,
04:24and we'll talk about that list in a few minutes,
04:27that has a really low engagement level because one, we didn't use it.
04:31We had a really long amount.
04:33We built up a user list for a few years, but we never really sent emails out.
04:36And when I say we, I just never sent the emails out, so users forgot that they subscribed.
04:40And then once I sent an email out, I had a high level of people complaining about spam
04:45because they didn't even remember that they were on our newsletter,
04:48especially because we changed our brand name at some point.
04:51So three, four years ago, we were everything, we were everything flash.
04:56Today, we're zero to geek, zero to skills, zero to.
04:59And the zero to brand wasn't known to them, which is a really, really big problem.
05:05And it created a lot of issues for us, and we're dealing with those issues still.
05:08That's one of the reasons why we separated the list and we're cleaning up the list slowly.
05:12And we're focusing on this list that is really good and really highly engaged.
05:16All right, last but not least is the complaints.
05:19Now, because we know we didn't have any complaints, we're not going to see or anything,
05:23but that's a very good thing to look at.
05:25And if you roll over any of these question marks, it'll tell you what it is.
05:28But basically, you can see that one complaint for every thousand is bad.
05:32And you shouldn't get more than that.
05:34So you really want to work hard on creating really highly engaged users
05:39that are not complaining.
05:40The more they click, the more they download,
05:42the more street credit you get with the ISPs,
05:45which are the email, whatever you want to call it, the email servers.
05:51And the email service providers or the ISPs, whatever the acronym is,
05:55it doesn't really matter.
05:57And those are the numbers that you really want to focus on a lot.
06:01You want to make sure that people are not complaining that you're spammy.
06:04You want to make sure that people are clicking and they're getting your email.
06:07You want to make sure that they're opening those emails.
06:09And I'm going to talk about a formula about how to make that happen
06:12and towards the end of this course, once we wrap up this conversation about reports
06:16and I'll give you a step-by-step guide or a step-to-step,
06:19this is how I got to be into this wonderful position
06:22and how you could get to there as well.
06:25Alright, so this is it for this video and we'll see you in the next video
06:28where we continue down going through this list.